update: visa

so the place was closed last night. I made it all the way to the office, which had a light on and people talking inside, officially closed in fact almost an hour before I arrived. I returned this morning, at the godawfully early hour of 9am, and they said they took care of everything. *crosses fingers* The visa should be ready at 10am wednesday, and my flight leaves a bare four hours later, but it's better than I would have done on my own at the russian embassy, that's for sure.

In the meantime, things have been going ok. I've been feeling a little out of sorts this week, but the cold-and-cloudy weather we've been having has been replaced by cold-and-clear, which is infinitely easier to wake up in. Also, I have nothing going on this weekend, and I plan to sleep like nobody's business. And do analysis (lots of it).

an adventure into the world of diplomatic intrigue, maybe

Such is what happens when you try to get a visa from the Russian Federation. In fact, I'm about to go back to the office today with my paperwork to try to apply again (but that's putting the happy ending at the beginning of the story, which really ruins the tension).

Background: I'm going to visit my friend Rachel, who's studying in St. Petersburg this term, over thanksgiving weekend. We have made several attempts to hang out in a non-college setting, and they've mostly either not panned out or been disastrous (witness my not visiting Amherst this summer, the crashing at my cousins' house last spring, etc). I had promised to visit her in russia this term, and so there was some definite pressure to break the streak of terrible luck this time and actually go. I was challenging historical precedent, though--from Napoleon to Nazi Germany, European invaders have had trouble making it all the way to Moscow.

We planned for thanksgiving break, and because we both got long weekends (apparently because american study abroad programs would feel bad if you had to go to classes on thanksgiving, even though as a holiday it's wayyyyyyy further off the radar than halloween), we decided to meet up in moscow. Now, i'd heard that american citizens have a tough time getting visas to russia, but it was only wednesday that i found out that everyone has trouble getting visas to russia.

It was wednesday morning that i went to the embassy (the consulate, following some sort of international regulation, is only open from 9am-noon mon/wed/fri). There was already a line spilling onto the sidewalk of people waiting for consular... whatever it is that they do at a consulate. The guy in charge of letting people through the big iron gate out front didn't seem to be particularly friendly, and i stood in line for almost fifteen minutes (watching several people walk up to the gate directly, bypassing all of us) before getting sick of it. I walked up to the gate, and the next time the guy came out, I held my papers (a visa application from the russian embassy in DC's website) and passport and asked him if they were ok. He, surprisingly, was quite friendly--I got the sense he spoke english better than hungarian--and gave me a different form to fill out, and sent me across the street to this sketchy little office which seemed only to exist to make copies of your passport, which are required for a russian visa.

I returned, with barely twenty minutes to spare until noon. The guy let me into the consulate, where there was (guess what!) another line in a bare, ugly looking waiting room. I finally had my turn to walk up to a window, and presented the consular officer with my (new) paperwork. He looked at it, looked at my passport, and stood up. Talking to a woman working at a desk behind him, he rifled through stacks of blank forms, finally returning with the exact same form i had originally filled out, only with a ______ in place of "united states" in the Embassy of the Russian Federation to the United States line. He wouldn't let me submit my old or my new paperwork, so I had to go back to the waiting room part to fill the paper out. When I finished, I had to wait for him again specifically, because he had the photocopy of my passport at his desk. Once he was free, I discovered (to my horror) that the hotel confimation I was planning to have faxed to the consulate could not be faxed, only hand-delivered. The officer seemed apologetic, but said he couldn't accept my application without the hotel voucher, but couldn't accept a hotel voucher by fax without an application. As an alternative, he offered, "The woman standing behind you represents a tourism office. She can help you. I would like to help you, but I can do nothing," and then handed me a business card for this (private) tourism office from a stack on his desk and sent me on my way.

Fortunately, the tourism office had an address a couple short blocks from the embassy, so I figured I'd walk there directly. When I got to the building, it turned out to be large and completely unmarked; the front door was locked and curtained. To get to the tourism office, as I figured out later, you had to enter through a side door, talk to a security guard who spoke only russian and a little hungarian, walk up three flights of stairs, cross through a cafeteria, exiting via a back door, and walk down a hallway lined with unmarked doors--the tourism office was at the end, and contained three desks with computers, a photocopier, and a large wall map of russia. They turned out to be very helpful, and can apply for the visa in my stead, getting it sooner than if I had tried to apply personally, but the whole thing just seems... sketchy.

Speaking of which, I need to get there before they close. Szia!

another week gone

... and so few left (a scary thought, to be sure). For one, I have a midterm this wednesday, not to mention loads of make-up classes (to compensate for time lost to national holidays and such, only it's at monday, 8am) and more work than I'm anxious to do.

Further, I haven't done nearly the travelling I would have liked, although I'm working on it--I went to Vienna this past weekend. It was a great trip, although far too short. I went with Jacob, and we stayed with people he'd worked with a little bit on some research over the summer, but who he had never actually personally met (but were unbelievably kind and generous); the guy Jacob knew, Thomas, took us to an improvised contemporary music concert (the subject of their research/interest in common; I found it a little challenging). It was really cold there, but we got a fair amount of coffee to make up for it. I got lots of postcards there, and I'm going to actually, for real, send a batch out to everyone. It blew me away just how starkly different things were between Vienna and other places we've been (Romania represents the starkest contrast, but Austria is surprisingly different even from Hungary). Although the center of town has been preserved to maintain a sort of classical identity, the outlying areas were very built up and developed--modern architecture and bright colors were common. Although we did our fair share of wandering through some residential neighborhoods, saw the Duna (there called the Donau), etc, the whole downtown seems to be held together by tourism. Don't get me wrong, it was gorgeous, it was just... somehow less authentically part of the city--the Habsburg palace, the Hofburg, is cited as one of the main attractions, but Thomas said he'd never been inside once having lived in the city for seven years.

That said, we did end up going to a museum (the Belvedere, home of Klimt's "the Kiss"), which had an exhibition that was part Austrian history and part art collection, spanning the 20th century. Observations:
1. wow, did i not know much about austrian history beyond the monarchy (which ended in 1918)
2. "The Kiss", which I had previously assumed was a 'best-known' painting, iconic, but not necessarily better than the rest of the artist's work, is, in fact, absolutely amazing. Gorgeous. Words alone cannot describe.
3. again, the history major in me is fascinated by the way Austria directly addressed the parts of its history that it, no doubt, would prefer to forget
4. we got to see two of the pistols used in Franz Ferdinand's assassination in Sarajevo, which was totally cool.

... in which i visit a Hungarian hospital

Romania was a great trip; it was beautiful, we met all sorts of interesting and friendly people, and things were so cheap, it made Hungary look expensive. That said, I had a little bit of a panic attack, caused by some abdominal pains and... let's just call it a 'symptom' sunday night (by now a week and a half ago). The owner of our pension, Eugene, a really interesting guy, took me to a pharmacy, where they tried to sell me a shot (Eugene said his mother was a nurse and could administer it from home) and also some pills, which were made in Egypt and I'm sure not FDA-approved. If I've heard anything about European pharmaceudicals, though, it's that they're effective. I had a pretty good equivalent of Theraflu called NeoCitran that wiped out my pre-midterms cold, and Kelly reported great success with painkillers sold in Macedonia. That said, although I felt better since then, I wanted to make sure nothing was serious wrong with me or my kidneys.

Thus, the hospital. I had no idea what to expect, and it was definitely a little scary, but things worked out. I got an english-speaking doctor, had an ultrasound (which was as close as i'll ever come, i think, to that one expectant mothers get), and so forth, and all for a fraction (i'm assured it was a small fraction) of what the cost would have been if i'd done the same thing in the US. There were some quirky bits, as well:

--One of the doctors, after asking briefly about my symptoms, started asking me pointed questions about my appetite; although I swore I eat a lot (and I think my friends here would testify similarly on my behalf), she wouldn't let the subject drop.
--I was asked by a doctor how much I drank each day, to which I replied about a liter or two of water. Their response was, "That's not nearly enough. You need more fluids; water, coffee, beer, it doesn't matter. Just drink more. And Hungary has such fine mineral waters!"
--Recall that 's' in Hungarian is pronounced like 'sh', and that there are no dipthongs (vowels are all pronounced distinctly); also note that 'samu' (sounds like the killer whale) is a common dog's name in Hungary, like Fido or something. Now, I was sitting in a crowded waiting room, listening to some music, and a technician came out and said something. Everyone else in the room starts looking around, and I take my headphones off and ask the people next to me (in Hungarian) what she said. They just gesture, and the woman repeats, "Stromberg Samuel". People start laughing. I stand up and walk across the room to much mirth. After the ultrasound, I walk out, and am greeted with the same sort of giggling. ("Look! There's the foreigner named Fido!" or something like that) Oh well. That's Hungary, I guess.

sam